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FEATURE

DESCRIPTION

KEY FEATURES

Fedora is a general purpose system — it does not concentrate on one specific market. It is suitable both for home users, programmers and the corporate server. In each case it requires some customization however. It is the price that needs to be paid for trying to be good for everyone.

(8) Very mature, graphical (PyGTK) installer, offering features both for beginner and expert users. Contains most of the features a modern OS installer should have. However the install speed is quite slow.

Package selection

(9) Present. Single packages can be selected (all dependencies resolved)

Predefined package groups

(9) Very well-thought package grouping. All package groups include packages installed by default and optional ones. The default installation is a desktop system with GNOME.

Expert mode install

(7) No special "expert mode". Most of the screens (e.g. partitioning) include "advanced" options for non-standard configuration.

Graphical installer

(9) Graphical (anaconda) or console based installation.

Installer speed

(8) Reasonable speed of the installer.

CONFIGURATION

Graphical system management tools

(9) Many graphical configuration tools (mostly PyGTK-based). Most system-wide operations can be performed without opening the terminal window.

(7) Lots of packages (although not as many as Debian) with a few unofficial repositories (such as Livna and FreshRPMs) Warning: The ATRPMS repository will mess up Fedora. The Fedora Project package database can be found Here

Package management, automatic dependency resolving

(6) The famous Redhat dependency hell is almost over with the arrival of yum (the default package manager) and apt-rpm (the alternative one).

Graphical package management tool

(7) Fedora Core 5 provides yum based graphical tools such as Pirut for package management and Pup as the updater. Fedora Core 6 provides an update notifier called Puplet. There is Synaptic (a frontend to APT) and other similar tools available as the alternatives. In the most current version (Fedora 9), PackageKit is used as a unified package management for all distributions, although not all distros use it.

PERFORMANCE

System boot speed

(5) Average boot-up speed. The boot-up scripts written properly. Recent Fedora 11 has improved boot-up which can boot system within 25 seconds on an average system.

System responsiveness

(5) Acceptable speed and responsiveness, although there are no special optimizations for either desktop or server use.

STABILITY/SECURITY

Popularity

(9) Very popular distro. For many months locates around 1-5 place on the DistroWatch rank. Extensive support can be found at Fedora Forums.org

Security focus

(9) SELinux is included in the default install. Fedora offers a whole bunch of extra security features like Exec-Shield, Compile Time Buffer Checks, ELF, Data Hardening, Restricted Kernel Memory access and more.

Stability and maturity

(6) Fedora stability is comparable to similar distros like Ubuntu or openSUSE. There are many efforts to make the software testing within Fedora even better by implementing an automated test system. Will Woods is currently leading this project.

INTERNATIONALIZATION

Does the installer support multiple languages?

(8) Fedora installer is pretty well localized.

Is the system localized after installation?

(7) System speaks the language selected during the installation process. Of course not all apps are well-translated, but Fedora-specific ones usually are.

(4) Fedora is a community distro devoted to Free Software thing. No support for non-free formats is available by default. Fedora Wiki entry Forbidden Items explains the reasons for this and offers possible solutions. If you need restricted formats for some reason or don’t care for the FSF philosophy — don’t worry — you can still install all the packages from third-party repositories like rpm.livna.org and RPMFusion for Fedora 10+

With Fedora 7, the distro has dropped the Core part of the name. This is due to a major change in the distribution method, where there used to be two main repositories (core and extras) there is now only one. Extras was a user maintained repository which was merged into core, meaning that all the official packages are now in the same repository.